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NVIDIA Puts Out Two Drivers, Including For OpenGL 4.1

Phoronix: NVIDIA Puts Out Two Drivers, Including For OpenGL 4.1

While there's very few people that NVIDIA's dead open-source driver update helps out, NVIDIA has released two new binary Linux driver updates. The NVIDIA 256.44 pre-release driver adds in support for some new GeForce and Quadro GPUs along with introduces some "Fermi" (GeForce GTX 400 series) stability fixes while the NVIDIA 256.38.02 Linux driver introduces initial OpenGL 4.1 support...

I agree that OGL 4.1 is a bit useless right now. But I'd like to point out that AMD's driver takes longer than NVidia's to fully support new OGL versions because they're testing it more thoroughly so that it always has 101% more awesome in it, ya know.

It is high time they added randr 1.2 support. I am tired of using nvidia-settings each time to set up twin-view on an external display connected to my notebook. Plus it gives a single desktop of a large resolution spanned over two displays, and not two separate desktops.

What is more surprising is that the open source Nouveau driver does randr like a champ. Aside, I am actually at an awe at the efforts of the Nouveau developers . Last time, I was able to use compositing and 3d effects in kde/kwin with the nouveau (gallium 3d) driver. Plus kms was also awesome - although I don't use text mode terminals. There are essentially two things that I need now from Nouveau - some basic power management to keep the gpu reasonably cool and some support for openCL. (Hopefully I will have some time to have a crack at openCL after I am done with university.) For now, sticking to the otherwise awesome proprietary nvidia drivers which offer unparalleled 3d and 2d performance, vdpau playback, power management, cuda and opencl, active support for new kernels and xorg, somewhat decent twinview support and lastly, great stability . (This is on Asus g50vt notebook with Geforce 9800M GS and running Gentoo GNU/Linux.)

But this is all for bragging rights anyway, it's not terribly important if one of them is 2 weeks faster with OpenGL 4.

Actually, that's not true. AMD released the first driver wich claimed to support OpenGL 4.0, but they needed two more releases before things actually worked. nVidia was the first to release OpenGL 4.0 support and exceeds AMD's performance by far.

It is high time they added randr 1.2 support. I am tired of using nvidia-settings each time to set up twin-view on an external display connected to my notebook.

Yeah, that's one of the things I'm really missing in NVidia's driver.

Plus it gives a single desktop of a large resolution spanned over two displays, and not two separate desktops.

randr (1.2) offers exactly the same functionality as TwinView though...
It is possible to configure the driver for two completely separate screens ("zaphod mode"), but interaction between these screens is very limited. It probably isn't what you want.